I hope you agree this find was worth sharing. In its way, its almost as coruscating,
nourishing, and unstoppably funny, if only – as Americans say – on
accident. The central message of "Emptying Yourself for God" is a hell of a hook, and the total lack of rapport between unrehearsed host and puppet creates a tension I find it hard to grow tired of, however much the deranged animated inserts start to drag.
This Lucy and Friends is also the kind of reminder I always enjoyed getting, that before hitting its stride with wall to wall,
parasocial direct address and crafted video essays, YouTube was once a lot
more like the show Takeover TV, a kind of petting zoo for anonymous projects as its name suggests. Like Macbeth and the taste of fear, I had almost forgot.
* I'm trying to make formidable happen as a noun, a bit like spectacle even though that was never an adjective. Pronounce it as French as you like.
from Notebookery 1, where you'll also find the Artist and the Exterminator
Here's another record of a stepladder-set tale told in my dyed-black days of 2000 or so, this time at shunt's cabaret in its original venue of Arch 12A Bethnal Green, and accompanied by Jeremy Hardingham. I'm so happy to have any record at all of anything Jeremy's done, and of the messes we made in those days. His approach to physical illustration looks – at least from what can be made out in this video – more chaotic than Tom's work on Phonella's Shopping, but no less precise. I also included a tiny bit of footage he took of his flat with my Hi-8 camera as prelude, because I liked the pull out and reveal.
Inspiration for The Bed-Daughter probably came from the idea a myth is a real person's life mangled beyond recognition, in this case: the biographies of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – a potentially souring insight I share only because the floppy-haired twenty-something who originally wrote this would want you to know. The music is by Mouse On Mars.
Content warning: tobacco use, live flames, hair othering, face shaming, insect powder, mention of nails through extremities, an almost entirely passive female protagonist, and David Rosenberg in a vest.
UPDATE: As with the Phonella's Shopping video, I added a transcription to run as subtitles because the sound isn't great, but for some reason both still just play the auto-generated captions when I hit CC. Does anyone have a clue what I'm doing wrong?
Sticking with politics, it's been a while since we checked in on the folks at Lembit Opik's zero gravity baby farm. The following is taken from the "Weekly Q and A with the Chairman of Asgardian Parliament" held on the eighth day of the month of Leo in the Asgardian year 0010 (full video posted below) with thanks to YouTube's transcription function...
12:31 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:
Yes, I believe we are live. Um and while we wait on the Chair, Peter,
would you like to give a summary of our um chair's meeting from an hour ago?
12:42 - Deputy Chair Peter Maughan (pictured):
Yes, Sarah. [clears throat] We're looking forward very much in the the meeting of the chairs [clears throat] looking forward to further discussions of our trip aa of the uh
Antarctic potential. We also are looking forward to whatever we're going to be able to do to
celebrate the uh anniversary of Asgardia and uh we had a lot of chairs there at the meeting tonight.
So it was very very good. Um we're waiting for some reports back from Lembit (Opik, Chairman of Asgardian Parliament)with regard to the uh discussions he's been having with Head of Nation
and with uh the Prime Minister. So we're hoping we might get some more news from him him at uh at this
meeting. But as it stands at the moment, we're really sort of waiting, absorbing,
looking forward to what we can do, and hoping that I can find a cure for the hiccups that I keep getting every two minutes, um, courtesy of the new drug that I'm taking and it gives me uh it gives
me hiccups. So, don't let anybody tell you that it's easy to lose weight with these
injections that you have because it is. But unfortunately, it also gives you ter terrible indigestion which I
have.
But no, we had a we had a very good meeting and we're now looking
forward to what Lembit will bring back to us. Lembit's in a in a conference in London at the moment (GB News' and Jordan Peterson's ARC). So, he's having to work around that. But, uh, we're hoping that he'll have some good news for us [clears
throat] in a few minutes when he manages to come to us. So, that's pretty much all we did. We didn't come to any huge conclusions
about anything, but we did uh we did have a good meeting and uh and that, and now we're waiting for Lembit.
15:12 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:
Thank you, Peter.
15:13 - Deputy Chair:
But now, now we're live. I should say that uh that my name is Peter Maughan
and I'm de deputy chair of the parliament of Asgardia which is the first space
parliament and also the first fully digital democracy and that if anybody's
watching this who is not a resident of Asgardia this is a good time to join. It's €100 or the equivalent in your currency per year and that gives you access to
all of the facilities of Asgardia. So if you're not [clears throat] already a member, get joined. Uh we
love it. We come together once every week as chairman of the committees of
Asgardian Parliament, but we also we also enjoy ourselves. We're all friends. It's all quite nice. Those of us who've been involved in politics for a long
time, as I have, know that politics is a dirty, filthy business. But this is not politics. This is politics with a small P in the sense that we are looking to
guide the the destiny of mankind in space and looking to safeguard the residents of Asgardia, but not to fight with
one another. It's very easy to fall out with me. I mean, I'm in lo local politics in
the northeast of England and everybody falls out with me. Although I try to avoid that, but we're just all friends. If I'm in
trouble with regard to anything, I can reach out to all of my colleagues in the Parliament of Asgardia and they're always
here to lend a helping hand. So, it's worth it to join to have that constant on constant friendship
just at the end of a phone and it's lovely and I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, I
don't know who's here. You can't ask Lem any questions because he's not. But if anybody wants to ask any questions of any anyone, I'll try.
17:48 - Doctor Sarah E v. Clark:
Peter, you are you're muted, Peter. And I think Lembit has joined us...
I'm glad they've kept the intro, but why change perfection?
That was back in November of 2022. Actually it's 'irreplaceable' isn't it?
And apologies, this will be a quite long, largely unillustrated, and not very happy post madly stuffed with microlinks, but if you click on only one of those links this last day of Pride, please let it be THIS. Thank you. I always liked you.
Okay. Probably the biggest, if not the only, historical development I've derived any genuine
joy and hope from this century is the shedding of my own
trans-skepticism as friend after friend of mine found the answer to who
they were and came out as trans and non-binary. In the growing light of their revelation the world seemed to me, in this one sense at least, to become better, and richer,
and more user-friendly and less exploitative. Then the party I voted
into office turned that light out because they thought it's the
Government who should decide what human beings are and not human beings. I've heard no one this year
wish each other a Happy Pride. So no, I can't say I've grown any fonder of Sir Keir Starmer since I posted the picture above.
But now Labour is finally finding a replacement, and perhaps the knots in my brain will loosen. However, as the man himself said:
"while this is an important moment it is not one for celebration. It is
one for reflection. On how a party that has always prided
itself on its anti-racism, its commitment to equality, its belief in a
better, fairer Britain could have fallen so far as to betray its own
principles, as well as the principles of the country. This is also a
moment to apologise once again. To all those who were hurt, to all those
who were let down, to all those driven out of our party, who no longer
felt it was their home, who suffered the most appalling abuse. Today, on
behalf of the entire Labour Party, I say: sorry."
... and, at the very opening of this Pride Month, Wes Streeting's replacement as Health Secretary going on the Today programme to pronounce that a trans woman is a man in a dress, an interview I have literally woken up thinking about most days since. (His exact words were in fact "I wouldn't say trans women are women", but what are they then, fucking UFOs?)
Sorry, wrong picture
And obviously – actually I'll take that "obviously" back, because so many seem to miss it – Starmer-mandated cruelty wasn't just reserved for the trans. Look at Woolwich Crown Court: With plans still in place to speed up "access to justice" by ending a person's right to trial by jury, Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson recently set a couple of unorthodox precedents, firstly by intitiating a prosecution for contempt of court against defense lawyer (and veteran of inquiries into Grenfell, Hillsborough, and the murder of Stephen Lawrence) Rajiv Menon for daring to remind a jury that they were allowed to vote with their conscience, and secondly, by sentencing the four Palestine Action activists left to defend themselves to a total of twenty-five years in prison for a crime they'd neither been charged with, tried for, nor found guilty of. What all four had been charged with was "criminal damage", specifically: taking a sledgehammer to Elbit Sytems UK "products" intended to be tested on Palestinians before being marketed globally as "battle-proven". (Who knows what "products"? Helmets probably.) What they were jailed for however was terrorism, with the backing of a Court of Appeal who had, in deference to the Government, reversed the High Court's overturning of Palestine Action's proscription.
But no, they're all tangents, because the only thing compelling me to write any of this at all was there was meant to be a mass lobby of MPs to reject the EHRC's "bathroom ban" last Friday, but it had to be cancelled because of the heat and so I was hoping we could all write to our MP instead (particularly if any of you live in Makerfield) and here's that link again please. I also hope whoever takes over as Prime Minister has a plan for the heat, and the hatred,
and the battle-proving, and I hope it's more than just letting it play itself out or whatever.
Finally, since I hope never to write about Starmer again, I'll use this post to share his very last interview before resigning, given at the G7 summit. Chris Spargo is a fairly new YouTuber to the scene, whose other videos include "Why is this bin everywhere in the UK?", "Do you really need to preheat the oven?", and "I just want to show you some weird stones". I love Chris Spargo. And Callum, Emma, Sib, Griffyn, Harry, Amanda, Ashley, Billie, Sarah, Alastair, Maya, Pippa, Jack, Jas, Jordan, Jay, Es, Ozzy, Miranda, Mamoru, Oli, I love you too. Happy Pride x
That's last night. This is not a sponsored post but if you're wondering, the PIKOY Galaxy Projector Light is available on ebay for about thirty quid, and I definitely recommend it. You can change the colours, and it also does stars but they're immutably green. I assume white light's too messed up for a laser. This was today:
I found a new park overlooking the Lea Valley, and it being Summer and me being someone attempting to live in the present, I lay down in the grass. Looking up at bare blue, my view was interrupted by more wavering forms: previously unnoticed cobwebbby gunk "floaters". The NHS website says they're only cause for concern if you've not seen them before. When I sat up and they didn't go away, I briefly made plans for going blind. Very briefly. I mean, something something talking books, that was the extent of it. Because then I wondered, what if they weren't new, what of they were one of the reasons I'd felt so much no this year, one of the bags over my head, in my way in my head? There's a blank wall in front of me now, I'll stare at that.
I'm afraid you will have to read the link in full to understand this. I should get photoshop again.
Okay. Good.
The hopeless, teeth-grinding paralysis logged in my last
post has lifted a little today.
And with genuine love and respect for
all who, by contrast, find themselves disquieted by Keir Starmer's
resignation, I do intend to pay my proper goodbyes to that feeble, purge-sanctioning pepperpot soon. But for now I just want to share this Unattended Article from nineteen years ago! I'd thought it prudent to start backing up the blog because who knows what's going to happen to the internet now it's literally being run by Nazis – sorry, "hard power" enthusiasts – and in doing so... well firstly, bloody hell if I say so myself, but this was a great read in its early days before I started just sharing stuff... and secondly, and more pertinently, having grown to believe my anxieties about the normalisation of the Far Right had only begun in 2008, with the shamelessly guff-spraying double whammy of Sarah Palin as Republican candidate for Vice President and an openly Islamophobic Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, I was genuinely taken aback to find in August 2007, when this blog had just begun and Gordon Brown just become Prime Minister:
I've noticed a number of angry
twenty-year-olds at work, angry and hopeless, robbed of any ideology.
And it occurred to me of course, any fellow thirty-somethings, that
these people have lived HALF THEIR LIVES under the present government…
so no wonder they're so scared and racist. It was alright for us because
we knew the Tories were baddies when they talked about "Preserving the
British Way of Life"… We grew up with images of gorgons smeared in blood
and cash and war… But "kids today", they've heard that same poppycock
from the good guys. Thatcher's not the baddie anymore, it's something
called the New World Order, and expect to hear immigration mentioned a
lot...
Having paid my respects to the category-defying works of Fred Spencer, I feel I should probably also share some weird, personal, self-produced music videos that are actually ept. Jazz Emu's visual album Ego Death (below) came to my attention last year when the video for Fun Kitai Furai Dei (above) appeared on a bill of comedy shorts at the Ritzy to a hot
crowd of universally dropped jaws. When real-name Archie Hendersen's full album showed up on youtube in March, its brilliance lifted me out of a particularly lightless attenion-deficit - I had just moved to a spacious flat near Arsenal and decided to keep the walls bare, a stowaway in my new captital P place, my brain two-thirds phone. That threat of playing statues hasn't entirely vanished, the feeling of wanting to tell myself to just go on ahead and I'll catch me later. But Ego Death still gets me moving.
Sometime in late 2000 or early 2001 going by my dye job (open auditions were being held for The Pianist) Tom Lyall and I staged one of the stories I'd written in the mountains of Bajardo at a cabaret at Chat's Palace, Hackney. I originally did these storytelling "acts" at Shunt's arch in Bethnal Green, and I might put one or two of those up as well now I'm finally digitising my VHS's. The scare quotes around "act" are just a reaction to my louche mumbling here. No level of video degradation can dim the splendour of Tom's work, even if the capture does little justice to his makeup choices as Phonella. Speaking of degradation, I thought I'd parcel this in a little Hi-8 footage of the region whose actual walk to the shops had inspired it, and I'm very grateful to Kane Parsons' Backrooms for cementing ageing VHS as a now legitimate liminal aesthetic. Enjoy (possibly with subtitles).
"It is wonderful, isn't, yes. Proper prestige telly! Yes. Glenda Jackson! And really, thank you all again for coming over, it's so – Bit nervous, yes. Ha. Now, I'm not entirely sure when I'll be showing up, but – Oh, she's the... She's Mary Queen of Scots, isn't she? Or her mother– Oh wait, THIS IS ME THIS IS ME!"
"... And that's it! Anyway, on with the story... No, I think that's it for me... Mm?... Yes! One take!... Well no actually, second take, but for the first one my idea had been that I'd just, sort of, be going around hitting everyone, with the stick, yes, and the drum, just hitting them very, very hard with the – there were two sticks originally – but we didn't use that in the end, and everyone, me included, thought 'tone it down, Ian, well not me included, but anyway I think there were nerves and so that was all, yes, 'on the hoof' do they say? Not much research, no."
It's okay to post old auditions from 2023, right? And it's okay if you want a quick clip for your new showreel to just film the television with your phone, it's fine, yeah? Great. Here it is then.
The title of this post comes from director Katrin Gebbe's excellent advice to me on the set of A Thousand Blows
as horses, carriages and stallholders reset for the seventh or eighth
take of me finally getting to run out of a pretend hotel for real –
obviously, you don't forget something like that. Look out too for some
lovely fortuitous swipes, my favourite having to be Kellie Bright
condemned to skeletoning at 2:10.
I never mentioned Hockney on here before yesterday, but I've mentioned Fred Spencer, with good reason. He used the internet as I feel it should be used, broadcasting hope, sharing his sadnesses, and living without embarassment. I'm glad he got back together with Sharon, as evinced in the video above, even if she's not interested in taking trips, and he definitely is. Of course he is. He's a pioneer. One of the first wave of YouTube celebrities.
Long after the video that made them both famous, Fred kept proving content creation wasn't just a job for him, but a calling. For over a decade he used this new platform to make whatever he wanted, whether it was Music Videos...
Satire...
Or whatever this is...
And the initial attraction of his output for me, obviously, was that so much of it was bafflingly bad. Or baffling and bad. Or bad and baffling and charming. And raw. Laziness was no impediment to his creativity, clearly. Fred would just throw the doors open and wait for poetry to happen – or to risk happening but then get derailed by him thinking about sex, then stopping thinking about sex but then thinking about volcanoes, as in the video below, which generates an emotion I have no name for.
Once relegated to life aboard the mobile home "Starship Betty" however, after his initial split from Sharon, he started to document a real life and, as I've written here before, I became genuinely engaged by and grateful for the candour of those unsponsored video diaires. I was sad to hear when things with Sheryl Ann hadn't worked out...
And when I shared my condolences in the comments, Fred was generous enough to reply. Then, a decade later, once things seemed happily patched up with Sharon, my comment received a second reply...
And that's how I learnt Fred Spencer had pasta way.
I couldn't find any confirmation of his death online, but that only made me realise how small a digital footprint he left outside of his own channel.
I've put off writing this for over a year – possibly because I've had, you know, as I'm sure a lot of us have, actual people I deeply love pass on in that year – but I knew I wanted some part of the internet to commemorate the passing of this particular Fred Spencer. And so here it is. He always kept things personal, and kind, and weird, and I hope his work stays up forever, because I honestly think it epitomises a kind of Internet before the fall, a pole star of the lived experience shared fearlessly, and a paradise we can return to whenever we like. In spite of all the algorithms trying to turn us into Hamlet, this invention is still ours, to do with whatever we like, for as long as we can pay attention to each other. Thank you. Where you've gone, I don't know, hope it's warm and sunny. Here's David Lynch.
For some reason, colours always seem happiest working with David Hockney. Here's a small, room-sized fusion of Renaissance Florence, Bruges and
Ghent he built for a BBC Omnibus in 2003 because television was also his thing. I'm surprised to find I've not written
about him before on here, because I think about Hockney a lot. And probably what I think about most often is his discovery – I don't think that's too
strong a word – chronicled – I don't think that's too strong a word
either – in this programme. Art as Science as Art, it's a typically beautiful piece of thinking, and a brilliant watch.
Studying the accuracy with which Renaissance painters represented
the play of light on a suit of armour or a chandelier, despite the fact
no naked
eye could stay still enough to capture the same gleam twice – and inspired by the perceived similarity of Ingre's line when turning out small
portraits of English tourists in 1812 to Warhol's tracing of old
photographs over a century later, despite the former predating the actual invention of photography – Hockney meticulously deduces that the reason why "from about 1500 to 1860 you never see a badly done basket" is not, as had been assumed previously, that everyone just suddenly got better at drawing, but rather that artists had been using camera obscura and – before the perfection of those lenses – convex or "burning" mirrors to transform the three-dimensional image in front of them into a two-dimensional, reversed projection that can be accurately traced. I think too about the scorn with which Art Critics greeted this theory, and I think about Hockney's calm counter-argument: then why are all the people in these paintings left-handed?
For this and many other reasons, he was my favourite living artist. Until today. I really loved you, David Hockney. Thanks for getting me back on the blog.
Iranian artist Soheila Sohjkanvari's "Leave to Remain" features a number of old passports stamped with incongruous advertising slogans. The one above is from Burger King (which now I think about it, I should have been able to guess). I saw it today at Tate Britain while catching up with my friend Viv with whom I enjoyed rooms one through eight. I was a little late meeting her though, because I'd stopped to take some video...
Halfway through Hyde Park I'd heard cheers and car horns to the south, and realised something potentially cheerful might be up outside The Iranian Embassy, so I made a small detour and arrived just in time to see someone climb out onto the balcony (I'm pretty sure it was out, not up, is that possible? UPDATE: No) take down the flag of the Iranian Republic, and fly in its place the pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun. (At this point my camerawork gets a bit shaky because I had to take my gloves off to zoom in.)
The police sirens were clearly for somewhere else, and I guess the van driving up and down was
showing Fox Newson its flank, but cropped, so your only clue is Sean
Hannity – does Hannity still work at Fox? Of course, a lot of rotten kings and clowns with no history of supporting #women, #life or #freedom will want to take responsibility for this if it ends happily, but let's not let them. Picking up speed as I headed on to Pimlico, I sent what I'd shot to a friend at BBC Persian whom I hadn't seen since 2022, with love and hope that her family in Iran was safe. But how would she know? And walking home I learnt a little of it had been published online, which is how I can identify the flags.
Stop editing things, Simon! Sorry, me. But sometimes there's an itch you have to scratch, and sometimes that itch is wanting to see Lucky from "Waiting for Godot" perform Yvan's speech from Yasmina Reza's "Art" and you've had these two clips lying around on your desktop for over a year, and if it hadn't been snowing out you'd probably have gone for that long walk then come back to write those thousand words instead, but it was, and your neck gets cold now at night anyway, so you've spent the day all knotted, which a long walk would probably also have sorted out and now it looks like you might be trying to write a pastiche of the long speech above but that's honestly only just occurred to you and back to that itch, you can edit it all on your phone now which means you can't see the results very well, sure, but it doesn't really matter whether you scratch it very well at all, that's not the point. The point is it's scratched.
(Here I appear to have cropped out most of the snow in this photo of it snowing)
It had heart, and sense, and fun, and painted sets and giant puppets, all perfectly coordinating with the preexisting ersatz marble pillars on the Globe's thrust, and it kept surprisingly close to its episodic source material, with a lucid sympathy for its antagonists (theatre is work, and money does matter) but also an understanding that, at some point, we were owed some real nightmares.
It also did a great job on that winter's afternoon,of drilling home just how great a sacrifice Gepetto makes exchanging his only coat for schoolbooks. I felt every hug.
It was no less cheering to discover afterwards that the extraordinary creative team behind all this was also responsible for the much-loved COWBOIS at the Royal Court, a show whose every choice I'd found baffling, sad, and timid. It was, in fact, healing to discover this. Lively and freeing.
Where I took the stills from.
And talking of the murder of indigenous Americans: among the many Pinocchio adaptations I saw in 2022 was THIS beautiful restoration of a silent film from 1911 directed by Giulio Antamoro that included amongst its narrative tweaks a sequence about half an hour in, in which Pinocchio is rescued from the whale by "Indiani" who make him their chief but also attempt to roast Gepetto on a spit, prompting the puppet to sneak out of his teepee and seek the help of a nearby troop of pith-helmeted machine-gunners. This creative addition stopped me sharing it originally, but I'd always meant to cut a genocide-free edit so that the rest could be more easily enjoyed, and now I finally have, and here it is...
"This is the record of our second expedition to the site of Britain. It was a grim undertaking. But we had to go, otherwise all the members of the first expedition would have died for nothing..." We never find out what killed that first party in the end. Maybe they swooned themselves to death at the site of a porcelain cockapoo.
Because, despite its intriguing opening, what must be one of television's first ever post-apocalyptic visions settles almost immediately into a sneering fantasy upon the ruination of ghastly ghastliness. Ken Russell is directing, however, so nothing's done by halves, everything's shot with a warring mixture of love and hate rather than just disdain. Maybe the voiceover was scripted afterwards because Monitor thought it looked too beautiful. I have no idea why it was made, but that might be what's most enjoyable about it. Anyway this is your occasional reminder to check in on the BBC Archive's youtube channel, and I hope you're all recovering this new year's day, and continue to recover.
